The next thing you know they'll be asking our health insurance companies to reveal the clinical outcomes of our contracted patients regarding morbidity (sickness) and mortality and survival after treatment in order to support capitalistic competition based on outcomes. This would be devastating to our Ponzi scheme, er I mean health insurance industry....We don't spread risk, we ration care and we make money for our bondholders, what business is it of our government subsidizers to insist on our clinical outcomes!

9:04 pm October 20, 2010

UnitedCare CEO wrote :

My main goal is to ensure the profitability of my company so that I can continue to get multimillion dollar bonuses. What do I get bonuses for you might ask? Well, taking care of sick people is a cost, so I try to minimize costs by denying coverage for prior conditions or by refusing to pay for life-saving interventions. If you live longer, you'll just end up costing me my bonus later on, because now that the government forces you to by insurance from me, I can just replace you with someone else. The only way for me to make money is to minimize the costs of taking care of sick people, so by denying cancer patients access to alternate therapies and forcing you down one path, I can maximize my profit. Oh, and also doctors wont want to see you anymore since we will make them lose money everytime they see you. That's another great way we make money, aside from you dying quickly once you get sick.

11:08 am October 21, 2010

Health Care Provider - Private Practice wrote :

As frightening as the above satire is, it does seem that this is exactly what policies, rules, and regulations of insurance companies are designed to do.

Insurance industry can try to soften it all they want, but the public is catching on.

12:05 pm December 13, 2010

researcher wrote :

Typically, doctors give patients prescriptions for drugs that are then filled at pharmacies. But medical oncologists bought chemotherapy drugs themselves, often at prices discounted by drug manufacturers trying to sell more of their products and then administered them intravenously to patients in their offices.

Not only do the medical oncologists have complete logistical, administrative, marketing and financial control of the process, they also control the knowledge of the process. The result is that the medical oncologist selects the product, selects the vendor, decides the markup, conceals details of the transaction to the degree they wish, and delivers the product on their own terms including time, place and modality.

A patient wants a physician’s decision to be based on experience, clinical information, new basic science insights and the like, not on how much money the doctor gets to keep. A patient should know if there are any financial incentives at work in determining what cancer drugs are being prescribed.

Some oncologists prescribe chemotherapy drugs with equal efficacies and toxicities. I would imagine that some are influenced by the whole state of affairs, possibly without even entirely admitting it. Social science research shows that people can be biased by self-interest without being aware of it.

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